Comment by Daniel_Newby
12 years ago
> For every comment I read that was outlandish, fallacious and clearly media spoon-fed, ...
If you look at the timeline, the CIA had such a spectacular failure that an ambassador was raped to death and Hilary Clinton kicked to the curb. Almost simultaneously the IRS was caught embezzling money from anti-statist campaigns.
Every time those stories threatened to gain traction, every leftist organ would run another 48 point headline about Snowden or the NSA. The coincidences piled up until it is impossible that the NSA story's popularity was not largely a political creation, and just barely might be a false flag operation to punish the intel community.
Likewise, I was downvoted to oblivion every time I pointed out that the NSA story was not a revelation, that it wasn't even news. My first awareness of the NSA was their Echelon spying efforts, where it was openly discussed that they wanted to vacuum up all the worlds' communications. The weakness of the DES cipher was widely recognized to be a NSA plot to make it easy to intercept domestic comms. The Clipper chip and key escrow programs were a naked domestic snooping plan. This was widely covered by the trade press, a fair bit by the mainstream media, exhaustively by Slashdot and Ars Technica, and obsessively by the Computer Underground Digest, the Hacker News Network, the Cipherpunks, Telecom Digest, and many others.
Hacker News has also started importing the Reddit Censorship ethos. Downvoting rings censor many politically correct or just unpopular comments, comments that in many cases are correct but counterintuitive. The endless September seems to have finally arrived at HN.
Politics on HN, Exhibit A for the prosecution.
My comment is a non-partisan analysis of why most of the NSA story is astroturf. Astroturf can only be debunked by describing the conspiracy. This does not make me a partisan either for or against the astroturfers. If HN stories were showing up simultaneously and with the same headlines as press releases from the John Birch Society, I would direct my flamethrower in their direction.
And you ignored the other half of my comment, about how the NSA story is not news. It is merely new to excitable young people who mistake unfamiliarity for exposé. If I can convice them to take the red pill, they will learn that parts of signals intelligence are profoundly more important than even the astroturf claims, and at the same time more mundane.
Still, I think Thomas is right: your comment is an example of what needs to be avoided to prevent further devolution. The issue isn't whether you are right or wrong, whether the comment is political or non-partisan. Rather it's whether HN or any online community can take on such issues without destroying itself. Historically, the odds are poor. If we want to keep quality of the technical discussion high, I think that comments such as yours need to be reserved for elsewhere.
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> If you look at the timeline, the CIA had such a spectacular failure that an ambassador was raped to death
That's doubtful. http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/stevens.asp
> that the NSA story was not a revelation, that it wasn't even news
I still disagree on this (but wouldn't downvote you for expressing that opinion).
I now design and review systems with the assumption that the GPA (global passive adversary) is real. It's not a political thing; it's an observation of technical reality.
To explain why that is a shift in thinking, note that basically every web-site password reset mechanism in the world (apart from those that employ 2FA) is broken in this scenario.
Sensible people cannot expect Tor to provide the fig-leaf of safety it seemed like it offered.
GPA was not a default assumption in threat models before.
How recent do you think this shift is? I don't remember when I learned how juicy a target international telephony is, but it had to have bern the late 90s. Certainly defense contractor salesmen have been treating the hotel telephone with great suspicion for a long time.
I did't realize that anyone outside of movies even used hotel telephones anymore (except to call Housekeeping or the front desk).
About the other stuff, I only recently realized that the IRS scandal, the US spy who was caught in Russia, and Benghazi have basically disappeared from the news, while the one thing that the White House has the least control over and is the most distanced from is the one that is now most talked about.
Another thing to think about is that when the IRS story broke, a lot of new agencies were calling it a "controlled or planned leak" meaning that the white house and IRS had coordinated on how and when to break the story, timing it with new info on Benghazi for information-overload, and finally Snowden was just a freebie, while I'm sure they're not happy about the facts coming to light, nothing internally will really change, they'll continue spying on us, they'll just be more careful who they allow to access the information.
Well, since Snowden. Name a site with secure password reset.